Video Convertor & Compressor

Today is the time of high resolution video, even a less than $ 200 phone can shoot a video with a resolution higher than 640x320, I remember the first time I saw a digital camera this was the highest resolution that it supported that time. I have a Sony HX9V Camera, and it shoots in a weird Sony propitiatory AVCHD format with MTS file extension, I had a hard time finding a right software to convert them. This is pretty much how this post started.

With increasing resolution and quality of Camera and even mid range smart phones, the Capacity of your hardisk not increased in that ratio, in which space consuming capacity of these devices have increased. Today my digital sony Camera can shoot a High Def Video which will consume almost 100 MB for 10 sec clip, that works out to be 35 GB for 1 hour clip !, yes the video quality will be awesome and you can really count the nose hair of the subject, at 50 frames per second, but do you really want that ?  Filling up your 1 TB hard drive with less then 30 hour long videos ? With a video format which can only be played on your camera or Computer ? I guess the answer will be no and that's where the video convertors comes in. A Typical camera capture lot of information which is not detectable by the human eye and few information which you can say belong more to the category I will say "Attention to the details". The Jobs of video compression is to compress the format in a way that it size reduces without affecting (or minimizing the effect) the actual video quality for human eyes. There are various Algorithms (Codecs) available and they were first introduced to compress an analog signal so it can be transmitted digitally over a small band (your set top box transmission technology). Same technology algorithms are used to compress the video feed to less space.

There are various open source and proprietary video format available, but now a day open source is dominating, because it is freely and widely accepted. You would have heard names like MPEG, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264. All of these are Video Algo to compress the Video, Where as AVI is "Audio Video Interlace" which can have video feed into one of these formats with a interlaces Audio in formats like MP3, AAC.   

So why you need a video Convertor (On Computer mainly)

There are 3 Main Reasons

1. To copy a DVD or Blue Ray (RIP)
2. Convert Large size of video
3. Convert between Incompatible format.

It does not matter which video source you have but you need to convert, compress or rip a video will fall under one or a combination of the above 3 reasons.

There are many paid video converters in the market which offers to do this for you and you can trust the brands like Nero, but they are expensive. There are those which are less expensive but fails in few cases like Any Video Convertor and Xilisoft. There are also lot and lot of shareware software in this domain, Here is a Wiki list of these software's, you may find something useful here, but you can not be sure how risk free those options, many of the freeware exibit the quality of trojen. Most of them do not have digital signature. With incressing use of computer to store important and personal data I don't think so it is good idea to experiment with lot of free shareware. Because if your antivirus don't detect a threat it does not mean that file is threat free, it can simply mean it is not tested by virus labs of your software. Use your antivirus only as last line of defense for your computer rather than first. The first line of defense is your cautious decision. 

So Where to go :

Well there few open source and time tested free products available in the market and there are fewer of them which are actually useful for End user. 

Like 

FFMpeg : 

This I think is the most initial release of software which set the wheel for free video format conversion, it is a opensource command line utility, which converts your video for you and most of the Open source free video convertor you will find on web will be the wrapper around FFMpeg project, it is the milestone project in these category. but the only reason I will not recomment using it, is that it is not user friendly for most of the users. There is a detail wiki which tell you how to use it, plus you will find 10s of free software wrapping around it, hence making indirect use.
 

HANDBREAK 

This is a opensource project which works on both mac and windows, though output format type of this software are less, but they (output formats) are most accepted formats out there.


You can checkout this rough video conversion matrix wiki here.

But with easy UI, queue options, and create every job as batch file, this becomes the favorite video convertor out there, it also wraps FFMpeg, increacing it video conversion range. It also comes with a pre define setting for 2 of the most popular platform android and apple, hence making it very effective convertor for beginners. 

 

 

There is a detailed wiki for this software and lot of community help, but the think which makes it most likely pick, it is free, open source and time tested. Making it useful and safe at same time.

It converts my Sony MTS (AVCHD) Videos with a charm, making it very useful for this uncommon format.

So go try it, you might like what you found ?